History
Atlanta grew up on a site occupied by the Creek people, which included a major village called Standing Peachtree. There is some dispute over whether the Creek settlement was called Standing Peachtree or Standing Pitch Tree, corrupted later to peach. Pine trees, common to the area, were also known as pitch trees due to their sap.
A trail known as the Peachtree Trail stretched from northeast Georgia to Standing Pitch Tree along the Chattahoochee River. The original Peachtree Road began in 1812 at Fort Daniel located at Hog Mountain in present-day Gwinnett County and ran along the course of the trail to the Chattahoochee. Some portions of the present road trace this route.
In 1867, the name of Whitehall Street, the original road to White Hall Tavern in today's West End neighborhood, was changed to Peachtree Street from Marietta Street south to the railroad crossing (now "gulch") just north of Alabama Street. Later in the 1980s, the portion of Whitehall Street from Five Points south to Forsyth Street and Memorial Drive, a major shopping district from the Civil War through mid-20th century, was renamed Peachtree Street SE.
In 2007, Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin unveiled a $1 billion, 20-year plan to transform Peachtree Street with streetscape upgrades, public parks, buried utilities, and the addition of a streetcar, based on a sixteen-month study by the Peachtree Corridor Partnership task force.
Read more about this topic: Peachtree Street
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)